The first Steel Panthers game dealt with World War 2 and the second game covers the years 1950-1999. The big wars that were fought between these years (1950-1999) were Korea and Vietnam in 1950s and 1960s, many Israel’s wars and Desert Storm in the late 80s.
The game allows you to play single scenarios or longer campaigns. In the campaigns player will first choose a group of units which will follow the player throughout the campaign and these units will get more experience in the battle. Before each mission you can buy support units with the points you have earned from the battle. Steel Panthers 2 has a several pre-made campaigns but you can create more with the campaign generator.

When you start playing the game it first might look just like the earlier Steel Panthers but when the shooting begins you really feel the power and the accuracy of the modern weapons. For example M1A2 Abrams usually hits with the first shot even if you have to shoot through the smoke or darkness. And its Sabot shells penetrate armor pretty easily. So the battles need much more thinking than in the first game because if you move your units into a wrong place - they’re usually as good as dead.
In Steel Panthers 2 tanks are the most important units in the battlefield - if your soldiers could destroy tanks with satchel charges in SP 1, it’s not going to happen in SP 2. That’s why you need to have anti-tank-missile groups in every bushes.
The brand new vehicles in SP 2 are helicopters – these are useful for moving troops and the helicopters with AT-missiles are pretty handy against tanks. However the helicopters retreat pretty easily when being hit.
In my opinion air strikes should be more powerful – for example expensive A-10 Warthog drops a few cluster bombs and shoots some Mavericks and then it’s gone without doing much damage.
Artillery is much better than in the first SP. It’s much more powerful, and now you can set the first firestorm to arrive without a delay.

Steel Panthers 2 uses the same engine as the first game so the graphics are as good as in SP 1. Sound effects are completely new. The bad thing about using SP 1’s engine is that SP 2 still doesn’t have modem or network game, so if you like to play with your friend you have to change your save game after each turn. However the programmers have added a playback button which allows you to see what happened in last turn.

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